Beach group trying to oust mayor

ST. AUGUSTINE BEACH -- A group of disgruntled Beach residents said this week that they will try to oust that city's 9-term mayor, Emmett Pacetti, with a recall referendum.

Their problem with Pacetti stems, they said, from his actions on three specific issues, which include:

n Pacetti's support for turning the city's popular volunteer fire department over to St. Johns County Emergency Services two months ago. The mayor said the change was made for safety and economic reasons.

n Comments the mayor made to a female Beach resident during a commission meeting two years ago in a discussion about speeding and traffic on A Street. Pacetti said he was against putting stop signs or speed bumps on that busy cross street.

n His decision, along with other Beach commissioners, to send an annexation and planned unit development proposal for the 26-acre Cooksey Campground property to the state Department of Community Affairs. The state will review the proposal to see if it complies with the growth management law. No decision has been made on the property's annexation, development or land use.

Unfortunately for the recall attendees, their first meeting earlier this week never got going because one of the organizers forgot to pick up a key to the new $1.2 million City Hall complex and everyone was locked out.

They waited for 90 minutes, thinking that a member of the city staff would eventually show up. Someone phoned the commission members, but none had City Hall keys.

Beach resident Marcus Nevacoff, one organizer of the recall effort, thinks the city staff might have deliberately left the group in the cold.

But city policy is to give members of groups wanting to meet at City Hall a written sheet outlining the procedures for getting a key and turning it back in.

Pacetti said he had been told about the recall meeting in advance and gave the city staff permission to give the group the key.

Public officials can be removed through recall for malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, and conviction of a felony involving moral turpitude.

''The mayor doesn't fit any of those but misfeasance,'' Nevacoff said.

That is defined as doing a lawful act in an unlawful or improper manner, infringing on the rights of others.

''There was an outpouring of public support to keep our fire department. But the mayor dismissed our petition out of hand,'' he said. ''We hired these people. We didn't elect them king.''

Florida law says the process begins by the recall group forming a committee and collecting signatures of 10 percent of the city's 3,734 registered voters on a petition within 30 days.

That petition must explain in 200 words or less the grounds for the recall.

Also required is an oath signed by the person circulating the petition, verifying that he or she watched each person sign the petition.

Those documents are filed with the city clerk, who verifies that each person who signed lives there. The clerk then gives a copy of the petition to the public official who is the target of the recall, and that person may file a response of no more than 200 words within five days.

The committee must circulate petitions with the official's response and must now seek signatures from 15 percent, or 560, of the voters. When those are obtained, the chief judge then sets the date of a recall election.

According to the Supervisor of Elections Office, no public official has ever been removed by recall from St. Johns County.

If the recall committee is successful, Pacetti would be required to resign as commissioner. The mayor is selected from among the commissioners, so a new one would be chosen at the next public meeting.

Frank Charles, another recall organizer, believes the 373 signatures on the first petition shouldn't be difficult to achieve.

Charles, a former lieutenant in the city's now disbanded volunteer fire department, said he and the other volunteers gathered 500 signatures in three days on a petition that asked the commission to keep the fire department.

''I think I could do (373) in an hour and a half,'' he said.

Nevacoff has said the petitions are already at the printers and that he and others will start the 30-day collection period soon.

But Pacetti said he wasn't worried.

''The people of St. Augustine Beach elected me to do a job, and I'm going to do that job despite these kind of people until the citizens don't want me,'' he said. ''I've given 20 years of service to this city, and there are so many other things I could be doing. (Recall) wouldn't bother me five minutes. These people are looking for issues, they're not looking for answers.''